Garfield County has a large landmass that stretches from west of Denver to the western border of Colorado. It has a population of over 56,000 people. The county seat is Glenwood Springs, which has a population of about 10,000. Colorado Animal Rescue (CAS) is a non-profit that has animal sheltering contracts with the county and Glenwood Springs. (The city of Rifle is located in Garfield County, but it has its own animal shelter that reports separately.) CAS takes in strays and owner surrenders, but has a waiting list for owner surrenders and charges a fee. CAS reported a 96% live release rate to Maddie’s Fund in 2010, with an intake of 931 animals (scroll down in the link). In 2011, the shelter reported a live release rate of 97% with an intake of 992. The shelter did not report any owner-requested euthanasias, and the live release rate with animals who died or were lost in shelter care included with euthanasias was 96%. CAS also reports its statistics each year to the state of Colorado. In 2012, it reported an intake of 1098 animals. The live release rate was 97%. Garfield County and Glenwood Springs are two of a group of communities in the area west of Denver that report to Maddie’s Fund and the Asilomar Accords as part of the Northwestern Colorado Coalition. Other members of the coalition are Summit, Pitkin, and Eagle counties and the cities of Aspen and Rifle. The coalition reported an overall 97% live release rate in 2010 and 98% in 2011 (see pages 1-2 in the links). In 2013, CAS reported to the state of Colorado. Its intake was 1096 animals, with a live release rate of 96%. The modified live release rate, counting the deaths in shelter care, was not significantly lower. Garfield County and Glenwood Springs were originally listed by this blog on May 8, 2013, based on their 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

San Juan County, population 15,800, is an archipelago located off the shore of the state of Washington. There are no bridges to the islands of San Juan County, and transportation is by air or water. The four main islands are San Juan (population 6800), Orcas (4500), Lopez (2200), and Shaw (240). The county has one incorporated city, Friday Harbor, which has 2200 residents and is located on San Juan Island. There are two animal shelters that serve San Juan County — the Friday Harbor Animal Protection Society (FHAPS) on San Juan Island and the Orcas Animal Protection Society (OAPS) on Orcas Island. Both shelters are non-profits that take in strays and owner surrenders. I spoke with officials from both shelters about the history and operation of the shelters. Years ago, the shelters were part of the same organization (hence the similarity in their names) but now they are separate organizations. OAPS accepts owner surrenders except for dogs that are dangerous to people or have killed other animals. They do not perform owner-requested euthanasia. In 2012 their intake was 218 animals, including 65 animals that they took in to help other shelters. They returned 83 animals to their owners and adopted out 109. They did not euthanize any dogs in 2012, and had to euthanize 10 cats for medical reasons, mostly elderly cats in renal failure. Their live release rate for 2012 was 95%. In 2013, OAPS had an intake of 160 animals, with a live release rate of 98%. The live release rate was 97% if animals who died in shelter care are included as euthanasias. The shelter official I spoke with at OAPS attributes their high live release rates to a vigorous spay-neuter program that was started 25 years ago. Feral cats get TNR and domesticated cats can be spayed or neutered for free. All shelter dogs are spayed or neutered, and OAPS will subsidize spaying and neutering for owned dogs at the local veterinarian, based on financial need. Here is a link to OAPS’s 2013 statistics: Orcas APS stats 2013 See the Worth Watching category for a separate report on FHAPS. OAPS and FHAPS both take in animals from Lopez Island, which has a foster program but does not have a public shelter. They also are ready to help when they get calls from the smaller islands in the county such as Shaw and Waldron, and the shelters help each other when needed. Orcas Island, WA, was originally listed by this blog on October 5, 2013, based on its 2012 statistics. This post is a revision and update with 2013 statistics.

In Which The Author Looks At Philosophy And Arrives At A Surprising Conclusion About The Best Method For No Kill To Market Itself (with apologies to Dickens) The animal welfare era in the United States started somewhere around 1900. Before 1900, treatment of animals in a way that caused pain or fear, including killing, was ethically acceptable to most people as long as the treatment was motivated by a legitimate human interest such as business, health, or safety, and did not involve cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The harm in cruelty for cruelty’s sake was not the pain suffered by the animals, but the degradation of the humans involved. The animal welfare viewpoint is that use of animals, including killing them, is ethical as long as it is done “humanely,” i.e. without unnecessary pain or fear to the animal. Animal welfare uses the standard that an animal’s interest in avoiding pain and fear should be balanced against the good derived by a human’s use of the animal. This may not sound like much of a distinction from the 1800s, but in practice the difference was large. For example, throughout most of the 1800s it was ethically acceptable to beat a horse to make it pull an overloaded cart, or to tie the legs of calves and stack them on top of each other for transport. Such treatment is not acceptable under an animal welfare view. The animal welfare viewpoint has by now survived a long time and is entrenched as part of our law and culture. Animal welfare is lacking in that so many of the “interests” cited by people to justify animal suffering, such as cosmetics testing and fox hunting, seem petty. Animal welfare is also revolutionary, though, in that it is a tacit admission that animals are not just property and their interests must be considered. Some people today are trying to create a third era of our relationship to animals — an animal rights era. Under an animal rights view, it is not ethical for humans to use animals for human benefit. Keeping pets is very problematic under an animal rights view because keeping pets necessarily deprives them of many freedoms that undomesticated animals have, such as the freedom to travel, to choose their society, to live with equals, to mate as they choose, to eat what they want, etc. This is the problem of paternalism. One could argue that pets have a much better life than undomesticated or wild animals, but that assumes that a good life does not include freedom. We reject that idea out of hand for ourselves, so it is hard to justify it as a rationale for pet-keeping. [Note: The view that pet-keeping is unethical does not entail killing pets. Instead it entails stopping the breeding of pets so that existing pets, as they live out their lives in their homes and die of old age or disease, are not replaced with new pets.] In any event, advocates for animal rights have so far had little success in moving society beyond the prevailing animal welfare view. Indeed, even animal welfare appears to have retrenched in some respects in recent decades with the unchecked growth of corporate power in general and factory farms in particular. So where does No Kill fit into the spectrum of animal welfare to animal rights? Although we sometimes hear “rights talk” from No Kill advocates, when you examine the tenets of No Kill closely they are not that compatible with animal rights. No Kill is fine with pet-keeping, for one thing. For another, although some No Kill advocates are vegan, I think it is safe to say that the majority of them are not. Similarly, it seems doubtful that most No Kill advocates refuse to buy products that contain animal parts or were tested on animals. A different type of rights justification for No Kill might be that shelter pets are more like family members than animals, and thus they should enjoy human rights by proxy. This view is not compatible with the No Kill movement, though, because it would allow for the killing of feral cats and unsocialized dogs, while calling into question the propriety of killing dangerous dogs who had been raised in homes. It also has the same problem of paternalism as the animal rights justification, since humans do not give up their right to make life choices simply by living in families. Even very young children are capable of expressing choices, and part of family life is to raise children to adulthood where they can make all of their own choices. Could the relationship of domestic pets to humans serve as the basis of a contracts justification for special treatment of pets, including homeless shelter animals? Under this view, animals who are not merely domesticated but have also moved into the homes of people and become their companions have in essence entered into a contract with humans where duties and benefits flow both ways. In exchange for the love and companionship we get from domestic pets, we undertake to give them a certain quality of life for their full life span. This alternative would allow the killing of vicious dogs, because such dogs have not carried out their part of the contract. It also would avoid the problem of paternalism, because it is not rights-based. It is not compatible with No Kill, however, because it does not protect feral cats and unsocialized dogs. It also suffers from the problem of contingency, because it could be argued that the contractual duty exists only while the animal is living in a home, and disappears if the animal loses the home. If the animal rights, proxy rights, and contractual approaches do not fit No Kill, what about the plain old justification of animal welfare? Animal welfare is, at base, a utilitarian philosophy of balancing the harm to an animal against the benefit to humans of a particular action. As it turns out, No Kill fits easily into the animal welfare philosophy. The harm to the animal in shelter killing is profound, because the loss of life is about the worst loss one can sustain. Some people would argue that suffering is the greater harm, and that shelter animals are in extreme danger of suffering neglect or cruelty in the future. There is no data to support this argument, however, so it can be dismissed from a utilitarian calculation, at least until the time when such data is available. The benefit to humans of shelter impoundment is that it gets animals off the street and keeps them from being nuisances. There is no benefit to humans of shelter killing itself, except as a means to maintain the ability to take animals off the street and to reduce costs of nuisance abatement. With No Kill, we now know that we can prevent homeless pets from being nuisances by impounding them and finding new homes for them. Medical treatment can be paid for by people who get satisfaction out of helping animals. Shelter killing thus provides no benefit to humans as long as the shelter can function without killing and with no additional costs. That is practically a description of the philosophy of No Kill. As mentioned above, the animal welfare viewpoint is not great for animals because almost any non-trivial human interest can be used to justify subjecting an animal to pain or even death. In the case of No Kill, though, there is absolutely no benefit to humans from shelter killing, because in a No Kill shelter the shelter performs its job without any need for killing. The animal welfare view has no problem with the issue of paternalism because it is not rights-based. It has no problem with the issue of killing dangerous dogs, because the benefit to the dog of being rehomed is outweighed by the danger to people and other animals of serious injury or death from the dangerous dog. An animal welfare view favors placement of feral cats in colonies and placement of unsocialized dogs in sanctuaries with other dogs, as long as these activities are supported by volunteers who get satisfaction from helping these animals, at no cost to taxpayers. The animal welfare view of No Kill is not as glamorous as animal rights. It is not as uplifting as viewing No Kill as an historic battle for an oppressed class. It won’t allow us to feel like heroes. But the benefits of accepting that No Kill is simply a logical extension of animal welfare are huge. Animal welfare is already the standard for our culture’s treatment of animals. It is the way our establishments, including businesses and the legal system, have been dealing with animal issues for the last 100 years. We don’t have to change the way people think in order to gain acceptance of No Kill. We just have to point out that No Kill makes sense. It helps animals and does not hurt people. That’s all the argument we need. So maybe we’d do better to get off our soap boxes and start explaining, with power points and graphs and success stories, why No Kill is merely a logical extension of the type of treatment of animals that we’ve already been affording them for the last 100 years. It won’t be as much fun as a march on Washington, but it may be a lot more effective.

Lynchburg is an independent city of about 76,000 people in Virginia, located southwest of Charlottesville and east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Lynchburg Humane Society (LHS), is a non-profit that has a contract with the city of Lynchburg for animal services. LHS requires an appointment for owner surrenders and charges a small fee, but states that it will make exceptions for people who need to surrender a pet immediately or cannot pay the fee. The shelter reported a 90% live release rate for the year 2011. LHS did not do quite as well in 2012, when it had an 87% live release rate. For 2013, LHS was back over 90%, reporting a live release rate of 92% for the year, with an intake of 1537 animals. The city of Lynchburg animal control euthanized 25 animals, and the live release rate for the community as a whole in 2013 was 90%. Performance improved in 2014, with a combined live release rate for the shelter and the city animal control of 93%. LHS has struggled with a relatively high number of shelter deaths. They attribute this in large part to their badly outdated shelter building, which has made it difficult to control infectious diseases. If animals who died in shelter care are counted in with euthanasias, the modified live release rate for 2013 was 83%. In 2014, the modified live release rate improved 6 points, to 89%. LHS began fundraising for a new building, but director Makena Yarbrough did not want to wait for it to be built to try to reduce shelter deaths. Last spring she consulted with epidemiologists at Cornell to find out how shelter staff could keep infection under control as much as possible in the old building. She implemented their ideas, including getting as many kittens out of the shelter as fast as possible. Yarbrough started a Kitten Warrior neonatal foster program and made it an all-hands-on-deck event. These efforts were responsible for the 6-point  increase in the modified live release rate from 2013 to 2014, as kitten and cat deaths were 65% lower. As of this past Monday the new shelter building was completed and they are moving animals in.  The grand opening is March 21, 2015. This new shelter should substantially help Lynchburg in its continuing effort to reduce the number of shelter deaths. Many shelters have blogs, but the LHS blog is particularly worth following because it occasionally has posts that analyze its programs from a statistical or outcomes point of view. Three posts that are worth reading for their statistical analyses are linked here: Owners Are Helping Us Save Lives By Waiting TNR Opinion – It Is Time We Fix The Problem Can You Wait Please? It Means Life To Us! Lynchburg is listed in the Running Totals as a 90%+ community.

The most common measure of shelter performance is the live release rate, which measures the live outcomes of an individual shelter against its euthanasias. There is another measure of shelter performance in common use, and that is Pets Per Thousand People (PPTP). Although it says “pets,” what it really measures is shelter intake per thousand people. Additional “per thousand people” measures include euthanasia (EPTP) and adoption (APTP). Proponents of the “PTP” metric (which was invented by Merritt Clifton) argue that we must standardize shelter statistics against human population to be able to compare communities to each other in a meaningful way. I think that the PPTP and its associated measurements suffer from a serious flaw in that they assume that human population is a limiting factor on a shelter’s ability to save lives. In fact, there seems to be little correlation between PPTP and shelter success. In my research on shelter stats, I have seen many successful No Kill shelters with higher than average PPTP, and some less-than-successful shelters with low PPTP. In spite of this, I think that two of the PTP measures – PPTP and APTP – can provide very useful information in some circumstances. Shelter directors may want to be familiar enough with PPTP and APTP to derive those numbers for their own shelters and to know what the numbers mean for their shelter’s performance. Explaining why is going to take a few paragraphs. Let’s start by setting out the limitations of the PTP numbers. Standardizing numbers is a good thing to do if you have a relevant variable that is not accounted for by the numbers coming out of the shelter itself. For example, if community A and community B both have 5,000 homeless animals each year, but community A has 900,000 people while community B has 100,000 people, then the task of finding homes for all the animals seems as though it would be considerably easier for community A. Thus it seems unfair to judge community A’s shelter performance as “better” than community B’s performance if the shelter in community A rehomes 4800 of its 5,000 homeless animals and the shelter in community B rehomes 4200. In the real world, though, it doesn’t seem to be true that having higher intake per person is a handicap. I have a spreadsheet where I’ve entered data on the 100 shelters that were listed on this blog at the end of 2013 as having live release rates of 90% or more (serving over 200 communities). The PPTP for the communities served by 82 of those shelters for which I had 2012 intake data ranged from 3 to 139. I don’t think there is anything significantly wrong with the data going in, because the average intake for the shelters I list was 33 per thousand people, and that is near the estimated average for the United States of 15 to 30 pets per thousand people. The communities I list on my blog are a homogeneous group in that they are all very good at successfully placing the great majority of the animals their shelters take in. I verified this not by the live release rate alone, but by my research on each community. If PPTP is a relevant variable for a shelter’s performance, then one would think that these shelters, which are all performing at a similar high level, would all have a similar PPTP, but instead the variation in PPTP is huge. Why is human population not a fully relevant variable for shelter performance? One reason is that the relationship of total human population to potential pet-owning population varies a lot from one community to another. Let’s look at an example. The community in the United States that has the lowest or near-lowest PPTP number is New York City. New York City is far from the best in terms of the live release rate, though, since the live release rate was at only 77% in 2013 and 81% in 2014. So which is it? Is the New York City community the best in the nation at saving homeless animals, or is it only somewhat above average? The problem with trying to standardize shelter killing against population for New York City is that, as a big city, it has lots of small apartments and a very high cost of living. In other words, New York City probably has a higher percentage of people who are not pet owners and are not prospective pet owners than any other city in the United States. These people are not going to affect shelter performance. They are not going to affect the intake rate because they are not going to give up a pet, fail to have a pet sterilized, or allow a pet to stray. The low PPTP is simply an artifact of the type of housing in New York. So using PPTP to compare New York City – or any other large, highly urbanized, expensive city – to a surburban or rural community is not very meaningful for shelter performance. Another reason that human population in a community is not a limiting factor on shelter performance is that today we are living in the age of transports. Transports, by taking animals from an area of low demand for shelter pets to an area of high demand, can level the playing field between communities. Going back to our example of Community A and Community B, if community B transports 4000 of its 5000 animals to Community A each year, then each shelter will have to place 10 animals per thousand people. Yet Community B will still have a much higher PPTP than Community A, because PPTP is calculated on intake without subtracting out transfers. In theory, the PPTP could be modified to account for transports, but I have not seen this suggested by any of its proponents. Proponents of the PTP metrics argue that the live release rate is unfair to the shelters that are doing the best job, because the best shelters are those that are diverting healthy and treatable animals and only taking in vicious dogs and hopelessly ill animals. This idea makes some sense in theory, but in all my researches I have yet to see an example of a public shelter that has a low live release rate because it is taking in only tough cases and diverting the easy cases. Instead, it appears that a central shelter that impounds animals before diverting them to rescues, treats most of the treatable ones in-house, and centralizes return-to-owner and lost-and-found, is the more efficient arrangement. And for that type of shelter the live release rate is an accurate measure. Even if shelters do begin to divert large numbers of animals, such as cats who go to a return-to-field program, it would be an easy matter to calculate a live release rate that reflects the diversions. Having said all that, I nevertheless think that two of the three PTP measures, PPTP and APTP, are useful in limited circumstances. The average Pets Per Thousand People (remember this is really “shelter intake” not “pets”) in the United States is estimated at 15 to 30. There are many examples of successful No Kill shelters with PPTP higher than 30. As the PPTP number gets higher though, more and more of those shelters are achieving their high live release rates by transports. Although human population is not a limiting factor for No Kill success, at some point it is a limiting factor for being able to place animals within the community. Exactly where that limiting factor is no doubt depends on the individual community, but I think a shelter with PPTP of over 40 that is struggling to maintain a high live release rate may need to think about transports. (They also need to figure out why intake is so high and see if there is anything that can be done to address it, but that is likely to be a longer-term solution.) Of the three PTP metrics, APTP is the one that has the best argument for statistical validity, because it makes intuitive sense that the number of adoptions will depend on the number of people in the community. Yet this is not entirely true, because the real limiting factor on adoptions is market share, not the number of people in a community. In all but a handful of communities in the United States, the total market for pets far exceeds the total number of pets needing homes. There are currently some 180 million pets in the United States, and only about 5 million healthy or treatable shelter animals needing homes each year. With sufficient market share, replacement alone would provide more than enough homes for shelter pets. Furthermore, about half of the animals needing homes are cats, and many of them can be returned to field, further reducing the gap between the market for pets and the supply of shelter animals. Because market share, not human population, is the real limiting factor for adoptions, shelters can control their own destiny in terms of adoptions. Some people argue that there is a ceiling to APTP and that adoption rates cannot exceed 4 to 10 APTP on a sustained basis. In fact, statistics show that No Kill shelters regularly exceed 10 APTP, which demonstrates that 10 APTP is not a ceiling but a floor. The reporting shelters for the state of Colorado, for example, averaged 17 APTP in 2014. The Nevada Humane Society has historically averaged over 20 APTP. The value of the APTP is that if a shelter is under 10, you know it has a lot of room for improvement in adoption marketing. In fact, if a shelter has an APTP below the mid-teens, it very probably can do better and it should be able to raise its live release rate without resorting to transports. I have never been able to discover a use for the EPTP, which relates the number of animals killed in a community to the number of human residents. The idea behind EPTP is that we need it to accurately evaluate public shelters that take in only vicious and terminally ill animals because they are diverting all the healthy and treatable animals. This is ill-considered since, as mentioned above, today we do not have any such public shelters. In addition, EPTP is flawed because it fails to take into account all the ways animals can be live releases without going into a home within the community. Those ways include transports, TNR, and return to field. The way I think of PPTP and APTP is not as measures of shelter performance, but as information for shelters that are struggling. Shelters that have PPTP of 30 or less and APTP of over 10 probably do not need to be concerned with the PTP metrics. But for those that do not meet those standards and are having trouble achieving a high live release rate, PPTP and APTP may provide some useful information. So how do you calculate the PPTP and APTP? The easiest way is simply to divide the intake number or adoption number by the human population of the jurisdiction served by the shelter minus three zeros. For example, if you have intake of 15,000 animals per year in a city of 1 million people, you divide 15,000 by 1,000 for a result of 15 PPTP. The APTP for a city of 40,000 people where the shelter adopted out 400 animals in a year would be 400 divided by 40, for a result of 10.

Alachua County is located in north central Florida. The county contains the city of Gainesville, which has a population of about 124,000, and several small towns, including High Springs, Newberry, and the town of Alachua. The combined population of the city and county is about 247,000. Animal control, stray intake, and intake of owner surrenders is performed for the county by a municipal agency, Alachua County Animal Services. I verified in a phonecall to the shelter that it serves the entire population of Alachua County, including Gainesville and the towns in the county. I was told that the shelter accepts owner surrenders from county residents with no conditions, except for a small fee for unlicensed and unvaccinated animals. The shelter works with a coalition of five local non-profits — the Alachua County Humane Society (a member of the Million Cat Challenge), Helping Hands Pet Rescue, Gainesville Pet Rescue, Puppy Hill Farm, and Haile’s Angels Pet Rescue. Another important non-profit in Alachua County is No More Homeless Pets, which has a low-income spay-neuter program called Operation Petsnip. The University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine has a program, Operation Catnip, that does TNR for feral and unowned cats. Veterinarians at the Maddie’s Fund Shelter Medicine program, including Dr. Julie Levy, have been working with Alachua County shelters for years. Last but not least, the Wagmore Foundation has provided assistance. The shelter and its rescue partners have reported to the media that they achieved an 86% live release rate for 2014. (The media report did not contain full statistics.) Over 850 dogs and cats were adopted in a 2-day Maddie’s Fund adoption event in 2014, and almost 1500 were adopted out during the 3-month ASPCA Rachel Ray Challenge. Operation Petsnip sterilized over 4000 dogs and cats and Operation Catnip sterilized more than 2100 cats. The shelter is going to try for 90% in 2015. It is planning to hire a pet-retention specialist, and is mulling over some admission changes. Maddie’s Fund sponsored a project in Alachua County from 2002 to 2009 to help the coalition bring up the county’s live release rate, which was only 29% in the year 2000. The Maddie’s Fund project formally ended in 2009, but the coalition members continued to work together and the project collected statistics through mid-2013. The most recent full statistics posted by Maddie’s Fund for the coalition were for calendar year 2011, where the live release rate was approximately 70% with an intake of about 9600 animals. Alachua County, FL, is counted in the Running Totals as an 80%+ community.

Hastings, Minnesota, is a city of 22,000 people located near the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin, about 30 miles from Minneapolis. The nearby city of Rosemount, Minnesota, also has a population of 22,000. The impound facility for the two cities is Shamrock Animal Hospital. Animal Ark is a non-profit organization headquartered in Hastings which has a shelter that contracts with Shamrock to take in animals who are not returned to their owners. Animal Ark also accepts owner surrenders without geographic limitation, subject to a waiting list. In 2013, according to statistics sent to me and posted on Facebook, Animal Ark’s live release rate was 99%. Their intake was almost 700 cats and dogs. Shamrock does not report its statistics, although the Animal Ark director said that he was unaware of any impounded animal euthanized at Shamrock in recent years. Animals that come into Shamrock with medical and behavioral issues are transferred to Animal Ark along with the healthy ones. Hastings and Rosemount, MN, are counted in the Running Totals as 90%+ communities.

When people talk about the San Francisco model of No Kill, they are usually referring to a set of programs that were developed by Richard Avanzino and his team at the San Francisco SPCA in the 1980s and early 1990s. The team developed lots of programs, but some of the most important were fostering (1980), mobile adoptions (1980), animal behavior (1983), pediatric spay-neuter (1989), landlord-tenant assistance (1991), and Feral Fix (1993). Underlying all of these programs and extending through the 1980s and 1990s were the volunteer program, modern marketing, community engagement, provision of veterinary care, and spay-neuter efforts. Avanzino says that the volunteers were particularly important because many of the programs grew out of ideas originally suggested by volunteers. A lot of attention has been devoted to the San Francisco programs, and rightfully so, because they have proven to be the foundation of No Kill. We can accurately say that No Kill, as far as the programs were concerned, was in place in San Francisco by 1993. But there is another piece of the puzzle that is often overlooked by people who focus solely on the programs, and that is the importance of cooperation in making No Kill work in San Francisco. Up until 1989 the San Francisco SPCA held the contract to provide animal control and sheltering for the city. In that year, the SPCA gave up the contract and the city created its own agency to do animal control and sheltering. From 1989 on, the role of the SPCA was to support the city shelter, not to be the city shelter. It turned out that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. The two agencies – the San Francisco SPCA and the new city Department of Animal Care and Control – were so effective that the live release rate for the city increased substantially. In 1994 Rich was able, in spite of initial resistance, to get the city to agree to sign the historic Adoption Pact. The Adoption Pact guaranteed a home to every adoptable dog and cat that entered the shelter system in San Francisco. “Adoptable” meant healthy and of reasonably good temperament. Animals who were old, blind, deaf, or handicapped were considered adoptable if they were medically healthy. The fact that the city agency did the work of animal control and basic sheltering meant that the SPCA could focus on saving the animals who were not adoptable due to health or behavior conditions. In addition to taking in overflow of healthy animals that the city shelter could not place, the SPCA saved many of the treatable animals as well. The combined system had more resources (because the city was paying its share), and the division of responsibility allowed the agencies to increase their efficiency. The years since 1994 have shown us that the San Francisco programs by themselves can work well in smaller communities, especially if those communities are progressive and the shelter is a private humane society. In a community of up to 150,000 or so people, a single organization can do very well just by implementing the programs. Examples that come to mind are the shelters in Otsego County (MI), Charlottesville (VA), Lynchburg (VA), and Tompkins County (NY), all of which operate as the sole shelters in their communities. In larger cities, though, what we usually see is a cooperative effort with at least two large agencies working together. A few example are Jacksonville (the city agency works with the Jacksonville Humane Society and First Coast No More Homeless Pets), Washoe County (the city agency works with the Nevada Humane Society), Austin (the city agency works with Austin Pets Alive! and the Austin Humane Society), and Richmond (the city agency works with the Richmond SPCA). Informal consortiums of many organizations and agencies working together have also been effective. Examples are New York City and the metro areas of Denver and Portland, Oregon. The bottom line is that the San Francisco programs are important, but efficiency derived from sharing of tasks is also an important component of No Kill success, especially in larger communities. Indeed, cooperation may be the fastest, surest way for most large communities to get to No Kill. No Kill advocates who are frustrated with a slow pace of progress in their communities may want to look at the structure of sheltering locally. Does the agency that handles animal control and sheltering have enough support? If not, what can advocates do to provide that support? No Kill seems to require an infrastructure that is strong enough to allow the No Kill programs to be deployed, and in larger cities that may mean that the shelter should not have to go it alone.

Until recent years, public animal shelter buildings were designed with the idea that a high percentage of the dogs and cats taken in would be killed. In a traditional, high-kill shelter the owner surrenders were often killed immediately, and unclaimed stray-hold animals were killed after a few days. Many traditional shelters made a small number of select animals available for adoption, but even those animals were killed if they did not get adopted quickly. Under such circumstances, the thinking was that the health and comfort of the animals was not a big concern because they would not be in the shelter for long. Efficiency was more important in shelter design than concern for the animals. That meant locating the shelter near a landfill and building a big loading dock in the back to make it as easy as possible to load dead animals and haul them away. In fact, this blog’s title, “Out the Front Door,” is taken from a phrase that Rich Avanzino used in the San Francisco SPCA’s 1995 Adoption Pact brochure. The brochure characterized No Kill in San Francisco as a change from animals being “quietly euthanized and taken out the back door” to “going out the front door” into loving homes. As the mission of animal shelters changed, their design began to change too. Sheltering animals with the purpose of having them leave the shelter alive required much more attention to disease control. This meant that animals could no longer be packed together into small spaces, and that quarantine areas were needed. Air exchange became very important. In old-fashioned shelters cats were often kept in banks of small cages near or even in sight of the dog runs, something that could not be tolerated in a modern shelter. Cleaning methods included hosing down runs with dogs in them, or housing animals on grates, both of which are unacceptable in a well-designed building. The old style of shelter building made it very difficult to provide a good customer experience. All these defects of traditional shelter buildings had to be changed in shelters built for No Kill. Today, No Kill shelter design has become a thing. The cost of a new shelter can be substantial – even relatively small shelters can cost in the $4-5 million range. But these costs can frequently be offset, and private humane societies in particular have been extremely successful at fund-raising for new shelters. It is more challenging to persuade municipalities to invest in a new shelter, since cities and counties today have many infrastructure needs. It isn’t hopeless, though. One possible answer for a city or county is to have a non-profit organization raise money to turn over to the local government for a new shelter. Another would be a ballot measure to approve a millage earmarked for a new shelter. For shelter operators that cannot afford a new building and where fund-raising is not practical (for example, if the city or county owns the land and the building and is not interested in building a new shelter) a lot can be done to cheaply retrofit the existing building. An outdoor space can be landscaped as an area for adopters to get to know dogs or to see how their current dog gets along with a potential new family member. The entry to the shelter can be expanded and transformed from institutional to welcoming. A shelter I visited last week opened up one wall in the entry so that visitors can see into the operations area and be quickly greeted. In the opposite wall a large window was added to give a view into a cat playroom, which had been converted from storage closets. One area where retrofitting an old shelter seems to fail in many cases is with “grey area” animals. At around an 80% live release rate, the difficulty level in saving animals seems to ratchet up. As I’ve heard from more than one shelter director, after 80% the job of getting to No Kill can get exponentially harder because the animals remaining to be saved are ones that have serious issues. The goal of No Kill is to save all healthy and treatable animals. What seems to happen around the 80% or 85% mark is that the answer to whether a remaining animal is treatable may be “yes, but . . . .” These animals may need extensive rehabilitation for medical or behavioral issues, or need a special home. Grey-area animals can include those who are more susceptible to infections, such as young kittens and animals with skin disease. The ideal thing is to get those animals out of the shelter and into foster homes as quickly as possible, but fosters are not always available. Even with retrofitting it can be very hard to save those animals in an old-fashioned shelter. In such cases a modern shelter designed with disease control in mind can be a lifesaver. This was the result with the Lynchburg Humane Society when they built their new shelter (see photo above). Dog behavior cases are another group of grey-area animals who are hard to accommodate in an old, poorly designed shelter building. A crowded, older shelter may have to co-house dogs, and some dogs cannot tolerate this. Even if the shelter has enough space to allow a dog to have its own run, the dog may still deteriorate from stress and noise. A dog that might have been just fine behaviorally in a modern shelter may become aggressive or a stressed-out basket case in the environment of an old-fashioned shelter. People can be amazingly creative in making an old shelter building work in the world of modern sheltering, but there are limits to retrofitting. Since the purpose of animal shelters has changed so dramatically in the last 25 years, one of the goals of No Kill should be making sure that the local shelter building is reformed along with the mission. Shelter animals deserve safe, humane housing while they wait for placement. And a new shelter building can be the capstone of a community’s effort to go No Kill. A new shelter building can symbolize, in bricks and mortar, the community’s commitment to the type of sheltering that sends animals out the front door alive, healthy, and happy.

In my last blog post I discussed the fact that some parts of the country already have a shortage of shelter dogs, and observed that if trends continue we will have a nationwide shortage of shelter dogs in the not-too-distant future. What are the numbers to back that up? The HSUS estimates that we currently have an intake of about 7 million animals per year into shelters nationwide. Since the year 2000, shelter intake has been fairly stable in spite of a rapidly growing human population. Shelter outcomes include about 3.5 million adoptions and 2.7 million killings of healthy or treatable cats and dogs per year.  If we assume that half of the total 6.2 million adoption and euthanasia outcomes are dogs (in reality dogs are likely to be less than half, since the return-to-owner rate is much higher for dogs), that is about 3.1 million dogs per year who are in the shelter system and looking for homes. That means we would need a total of, at most, 3.1 million dog adoptions in 2015 to zero out shelter killing of healthy or treatable shelter dogs — i.e., to make demand meet supply. In 2013, Colorado shelters were able to adopt out 10.5 dogs per 1000 people. The United States currently has a population of about 320 million people. If Colorado’s adoption rate could be replicated in the United States as a whole in 2015, shelters would adopt out 3.4 million dogs. That is more than the supply of about 3.1 million healthy or treatable shelter dogs that will be available for adoption in 2015. Colorado had an overall live release rate of 89% in 2013. Right now Colorado is ahead of the pack with its live release rate, but the rest of the country is catching up at a very rapid clip. Big metro areas that are now over 80% include Seattle, Portsmouth, San Francisco, Washington DC, Atlanta, Richmond, Denver, Austin, Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, and Fairfax County in Virginia. New York City is close to 80%. Big cities that are making rapid strides include San Antonio and Tampa. Entire states in the northeast are at No Kill, including New Hampshire and (by estimate) Maine and Vermont. No Kill is happening much faster than most people think, and I would be surprised if the majority of the United States population is not living in a No Kill city within 5 years. Given these statistics, it’s very reasonable to conclude that we will have a shelter dog shortage in the United States in 5 years or less. A comment to my previous post suggested that demographic changes in the United States, specifically the aging of the population, might reduce the number of future adoptive homes for shelter dogs. That is possible, but it seems unlikely. According to surveys done by the American Pet Products Association, the number of owned dogs has been trending up since 1988, the number of households owning dogs has gone up in all but one measurement period since 1988, and 35% of people who acquire a dog obtain it from a shelter, rescue group, or by adoption (not purchase) at a pet store venue. The Pew Research Center has projected that population growth in the United States will continue to be strong between now and 2050, with most of the growth coming from immigration. Although the population over age 65 will continue to grow, that segment will be only 19% of total population by 2050. I think the combination of the continued growth of the human population, combined with the continued popularity of dog ownership and adoption as a means of pet acquisition, means that the outlook for growth in the number of adoptions is bright. How bad will the shelter dog shortage be? The projected population of the United States for 2020 is 337 million. At a rate of 10.5 dog adoptions per 1000 people per year, that would mean 3,538,000 shelter dogs would be needed to supply the demand 5 years from now. While the demand for shelter dogs will be going up, though, supply will be going down. No Kill cities reduce intake with pet retention and spay-neuter programs, and further reduce the number of impounded animals needing adoption by increasing return-to-owner and return-to-field numbers dramatically. Effective pet retention programs can reduce owner surrenders by one-third, and effective return-to-owner programs can increase dog reclaims to 60% or more of strays. If No Kill continues to spread, it is not at all outside the bounds of possibility that the number of shelter dogs needing adoption will be less than 2 million in 2020. Indeed, the number could be even less if spay-neuter programs further decrease intake. At that point we would be short at least 1.5 million shelter dogs each year to meet the demand for adoption. We don’t want those 1.5 million dogs in 2020 to be acquired from commercial breeders, which is why we need to start thinking now about how to supply that demand. So what could go wrong? One way for this projection to fail would be if the No Kill momentum that is currently sweeping the country stalls. No Kill right now is a juggernaut, though, and I cannot imagine it stalling anytime soon. A more likely possible roadblock to continuing increases in pet ownership is the cost of pet maintenance. With incomes stagnant and veterinary costs seemingly increasing rapidly, it may be possible that some people who want to acquire pets in the future will decide not to due to costs. However, if costs do become a significant factor in the decision to acquire a pet it will hurt shelters less than commercial dog breeders. Adopting a dog from a shelter is much cheaper than buying one from a breeder, and No Kill shelters offer support systems for owners who are having trouble paying for pet food or veterinary care. A nationwide shortage of adoptable dogs is not something that animal shelters in the United States have ever faced. When people have thought about No Kill for dogs, they have thought about getting to a 90% or better live release rate. Now we need to start thinking beyond that to the entire market for dogs. What place do animal shelters want to have in the dog market of the future?

I thought it would be interesting to catch up on how big cities are doing. Of the 30 United States cities that Wiki lists as having the highest populations, 6 are well established as No Kill cities: Austin, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver (although it still has that pit bull ban), and Portland. And 7 cities are making credible efforts to get to No Kill, meaning they have strong programs in place and are making progress. Some of these are in the 80% range or have hit 90% and the only question is sustainability. The cities are New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, San Diego, Washington DC, Boston, and Baltimore. I debated including Las Vegas on this list, but decided not to because its serious effort is pretty recent. That’s a total of 13 of the most populous 30 cities — which is 43% — that are either No Kill or have credible efforts in place to get there. In addition to the cities, there are high-population counties that are No Kill or have credible efforts, including Fairfax in Virginia and Hillsborough in Florida. The most amazing thing about this list of 30 cities is that only 5 years ago none of these cities were No Kill and only a few had credible efforts in place to get there. If we see as much progress in the next 5 years as we did in the last 5 years, the great majority of our largest cities will be No Kill by 2020. It’s not all good news, and some of  the top 30 cities are notoriously bad places for homeless pets. Memphis is on the list of the 30 most populous cities, as are Houston and Detroit. It’s becoming clearer as time goes on that No Kill is easier to achieve in progressive cities, and Memphis, Houston, and Detroit are not known for being progressive. The job of shelters in non-progressive cities is harder both because they do not get as much community and government support and because they tend to have less progressive leadership within the shelter. Detroit seems to be making a comeback, though, and there are some really encouraging signs of progress in Houston. I haven’t heard a single positive thing about Memphis. You can to a great extent gauge how desirable a city is as a place to live by how well it is doing at saving shelter pets. Certainly most people would choose New York, Washington DC, Austin, Seattle, Denver, or Portland over Memphis, Louisville, or Oklahoma City as a place to live. Cities that are not doing well at saving shelter pets are typically doing badly on many other metrics of what makes a city great. Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States after New York, has a particularly strong No Kill effort underway. That effort was the subject of an interesting article this past week from Best Friends, which is spearheading the effort there. Los Angeles has a large land area and a mild climate, which is a setting for huge kitten seasons. Best Friends reports that in 2014, 61% of the animals killed in the shelter system in Los Angeles were kittens. Kittens under 8 weeks, in particular, do not do well in shelters, and Best Friends plans to massively expand its kitten-nursery efforts as the key to further progress. Some of the 13 cities that are doing well are part of formal metro coalitions. Portland and Denver fall into that category, and have very strong regional coalitions. The San Diego effort includes the entire county. Even if there is no formal coalition, No Kill seems to have an effect on nearby cities. Austin, Jacksonville, and San Francisco have all offered significant help to neighboring communities. Working together regionally really seems to help No Kill efforts.

A great debate has been raging for several years now about how to control the number of feral cats. On one side of the debate we have wildlife conservationists who argue that the domestic cat is an invasive species that is slaughtering native species and must be eradicated in the same way that other invasive species are eradicated – by killing them all. On the other side we have No Kill advocates who argue that trap-and-kill programs do not work and that feral cat numbers can be managed and gradually reduced by trap-neuter-return (TNR). The two sides have been battling for years, with wildlife biologists successfully opposing TNR in some places. Underlying this debate is an assumption that has, as far as I can tell from reading the non-paywalled literature, never been addressed in any systematic way. That assumption is that feral cats in the United States are like other “invasive” species such as starlings and Burmese pythons, in that their numbers are rapidly increasing. We see projections that one feral cat can have hundreds of thousands of offspring in a few years, for example. The label “invasive” itself designates a non-native species that comes into an environment and takes over, squeezing out native species by its rapid reproduction. Think kudzu. What do we know about feral cat population numbers in the United States? The most accurate answer to that question is “nothing.” Over the years various estimates of feral cat populations have been made, often in the range of 60 million. One recent study that attracted a lot of attention estimated that there were from 30 to 80 million un-owned domestic cats in the United States. This estimate was made in a 2013 article by Scott R. Loss, et al., published in the journal Nature Communications. It is often referred to as the Smithsonian study. The Smithsonian study did not report any original research on the number of un-owned cats in the United States; instead, it made estimates ostensibly based on five other studies. The authors of the paper acknowledged, however, that: “No precise estimate of the un-owned cat population exists for the United States . . . .” Because they had no good data on numbers of un-owned cats in the United States, they used data from other countries to estimate what the population might be in the United States. The wide range in this estimate, and the lack of data from the United States, resulted in numbers that I would characterize as “guessing.” But in spite of the lack of data on the feral cat population nationwide, there are useful things we can say about feral cat distribution and their numbers over time. First of all, as to distribution, domestic cats are a commensal species, and as such their numbers are heavily dependent on the human population. As a commensal species, feral cats live primarily in the cities and suburbs. This is an extremely important fact about feral cats that has been given virtually no attention in connection with control measures. There is no evidence whatsoever that feral cats exist in sufficient numbers to cause damage to populations of native species in wild areas of the territorial United States, away from human habitation. Nor is there any evidence that feral cat numbers in wild areas are increasing. The commensal nature of the cat, and its dependence on its association with human habitation, means that feral cats are not an invasive species in the classic sense of over-running natural habitat and crowding out native species. Since feral cats require resources that they find in human habitations to reach high populations, efforts to control those populations must concentrate in cities and suburbs. We do not need to be concerned about most wild areas, because they have very few feral cats. In the cities and suburbs where feral cats live, there is not a black-and-white line between feral and tame cats. Although feral and tame cats may be very different behaviorally, they are denizens of the same urban habitat and their populations intertwine. In many colonies you will find feral and tame cats living side-by-side. Therefore, what we are really interested in for purposes of designing control programs is the number of free-roaming cats (aka community cats), whether they are feral or tame. The two important facts discussed above – that cats are commensal and that the population we are interested in for control purposes is free-roaming cats, point us to an important data source that has been completely overlooked in discussions about the feral cat “problem” – historical animal control data. That data shows us that the population of free-roaming cats in the urban areas where cats actually live has been plunging since the early 1900s. All we need to do to “control” the free-roaming cat population is to figure out what we have been doing right and do more of it. Free-roaming cats were apparently not considered a problem in American cities until the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, there are references in historical documents to cat shortages. Large numbers of horses and dairy cows were stabled in cities throughout the 1800s, and you could find cats in every stable. Horses ate grain, and cats deterred rodents from getting to the expensive grain. It was not until around the end of the 19th century that the number of cats grew large enough in New York City, Boston, and other large cities that systematic efforts to control their numbers were made. In New York City, that job fell to the ASPCA. The ASPCA has made their intake and euthanasia numbers available for selected years in the period from 1894, when they were awarded the responsibility for animal control in New York City, to 1994, when they gave up that responsibility. During that 100-year period, the vast majority of animals who were taken into shelters in the city were taken in by the ASPCA. The ASPCA is to be congratulated on their willingness to make this data available, because it is the sole source of shelter intake data that we have that goes back to the early 1900s. The cat-intake numbers from the ASPCA official reports are astonishing. In 1895 the ASPCA took in 24,140 cats. That number rapidly went up as the ASPCA ramped up its animal control operation. In 1914 the intake number was 177,234, and in 1928 it was 217,774. In 1934 the cat intake number peaked at 219,506 cats. According to unofficial reports, the numbers in some years may have been even higher. One report was that the ASPCA killed 303,949 cats in 1911 (Forbush, The Domestic Cat). But the number of cats impounded by the ASPCA fell sharply from 1934 to 1946, and in 1946 the ASPCA impounded 155,312 cats. The decline continued, and in 1965 the number was 75,858. In 1994, the number was 27,366. The number of cats impounded in New York City continued to decline after the city took over animal control in 1994, and in 2014 cat intake was 18,784. Meanwhile, the human population of New York City increased from 5.6 million in 1920 to 8.5 million today. If we pick 1920 as a base year and compare it to 2014, we see a dramatic fall in cat intake numbers in New York City, both in absolute numbers and numbers relative to the human population. The number of cats impounded by animal control fell from about 200,000 per year in 1920 to 18,784 in 2014. That is a decline of 91% in absolute numbers. The decline relative to human population was from 36 per 1000 people in 1920 to about 2 per 1000 people today, a 95% drop. Now, some people (particularly wildlife biologists, I suspect) would criticize these numbers as meaningless. They would argue that the numbers are for only one city and that enforcement as to cats may have changed over the years. These are valid criticisms, but I do not think they invalidate the evidence of a plunge in free-roaming cat numbers. As to the objection that the numbers are from only one city, we have quite a lot of national data showing a fall in shelter intake across the United States. This fall in intake has been particularly well-documented for the years 1970 to 2000. It is not the quality of data we would ideally like to have for scientific study, but it is consistent across a large number of shelters. Those estimates are that shelter intake nationwide, of cats and dogs, was some 26.5 million in 1970 and about 9 million in 2000. As to the objection that animal-control enforcement may have changed over the years, changes in enforcement up to at least the year 2000 were in the direction of more enforcement against cats, not less. And in any event, we are not looking at a subtle finding here. Plunges in the number of cats impounded on the order that we have seen in the United States is hardly likely to be solely due to changes in enforcement. Additional evidence that the number of cats in cities has cratered comes from ecological studies that were done in the 1980s. Cat densities of from 725 to 1813 per square mile were found by researcher James Childs in Baltimore neighborhoods in the early 1980s. I am not aware of any more recent ecological surveys of cats in cities, but such numbers of free-roaming cats would surely be very rare in cities today. So, what happened? Why did the number of free-roaming cats in our cities fall off a cliff? One thing that did not cause the decline in numbers was shelter killing. In spite of massive killing, the numbers of cats impounded in New York City throughout the early 1900s continued to rise. The explanation for the fall in the number of cats was changes in the environment. The great decline in cat intake that we saw in New York City from roughly 1920 to 1945 correlated with the period of time after horses and dairy cows disappeared from the cities. Cats lost their jobs protecting stables, and as the stables disappeared a huge chunk of the food and shelter resources that cats had relied on disappeared with them. Also in the early 1900s, cities began to make organized efforts to improve public health. In addition to getting livestock out of town, cities made big efforts to clean up the streets and get rid of abandoned buildings. Less trash in the streets and fewer abandoned buildings equaled fewer resources for free-roaming cats. Another enormous change happened in the 1970s as safe, humane techniques for spaying and neutering were perfected and veterinarians began to recommend sterilization for owned pets as a routine part of healthcare. This trend accelerated in the 1990s as pediatric spay-neuter became accepted, and today a very high percentage of owned cats – estimates are over 90% – are sterilized. As more and more owned cats were sterilized, there was less and less seeding of the free-roaming cat population by owned pets. Another factor in the period from 1970 to 2000 was that residences began to secure their trash better. Photographs of Baltimore from the 1970s show alleys full of metal trash cans tipped over by dogs, with the lids scattered around. Today we have garbage cans with locking lids that are much harder for animals to open. What part did TNR have in all this? TNR did not become widespread until recently, and it may be too early in the process to evaluate long-term effects of TNR on the population of cats in cities and suburbs. However, TNR should further decrease the seeding of the free-roaming cat population. If we could do TNR on a substantial percentage of the population of free-roaming cats in the cities and suburbs, we should see the same type of decline that we saw in feral dog populations from 1970 to 2000. What more can we do? A 1989 paper by Calhoon and Haspell found that it was the availability of shelter that limited the number of cats in Brooklyn, and that supplemental feeding did not increase cat numbers. If we are serious about reducing the number of feral cats, we need to reduce urban blight, including getting rid of abandoned houses, garages, cars, etc. In the suburbs people must secure their outbuildings. TNR can help transition cats who are affected by these measures so that they can live out their lives in comfort. For example, when people complain about feral cats in their neighborhoods, we could trap, sterilize, and relocate the cats to a safe place, and then counsel the people to secure anything on their property that could potentially serve as shelter for cats. But really, probably the best thing we can do is just relax. The trend in the number of free-roaming cats has been sharply down, and that trend is continuing. Since cats live mostly in the cities and suburbs, and since populations in those areas have been falling precipitously, we have a system that is actually working very well. We just need to be a little patient, and keep doing what we are doing. The only thing that might slow us down is the bird conservationists. The bird conservationists see what we are doing as all wrong, and they want us to be forced to throw out everything we’ve worked hard for since 1970 and replace it with catch-and-kill programs. This reminds me of the people who advocate mandatory spay-neuter. Mandatory spay-neuter actually results in fewer animals being sterilized, because such rules drive people underground. Similarly, catch-and-kill programs will result in people hiding feral cats, and being afraid to reveal their presence to anyone. This will mean that fewer feral cats will be sterilized, thus setting back all our gains. Large numbers of feral cats live on private property, and the bird conservationists do not seem to realize that no government can give them the right to go on private property to kill feral cats. The most effective way to protect our current success from the bird people may be to continue to grow our networks of feral cat caregivers. The reason the bird people have not succeeded so far in setting the clock back is that no mayor or city councilmember in his or her right mind is going to propose a mass extermination of cats. As long as our network is strong, that will continue to be the case. Wildlife conservationists have succeeded in derailing TNR efforts in some places, and that is a shame, but TNR, since it can be done by people on their own property, can exist even where formal programs are banned.